Her Brother’s Keeper
Mike Kupari
Baen Books
trade paper $16
ebook $8.99

If you like good, old-fashioned space adventure, then you’ll want to check out Mike Kupari’s first solo novel (he’s previously collaborated with Larry Correia) is a strong debut that based on the ending will be the first volume in a series.  At least if sales are good (such is the way of publishing). So go out and buy a copy, because I want to know the secret of that derelict starship they find.

Oh, you want more than that to go on before you buy it, do you?

Okay, here’s the setup.  It’s a couple of thousand years years in the future, give or take a few of hundred.  Humanity has spread to the stars, suffered some setbacks, and is in the process of bouncing back.  There aren’t many aliens.  The most recent they’ve encountered turned out to be pretty hostile, and in the war that followed first contact were pretty much wiped out.  But there are traces of earlier alien civilizations.

Cecil Blackwood set out to recover some artifacts from those earlier civilizations and ended up being held hostage by a warlord on a backwards planet.  Now his father has hired his estranged daughter and Cecil’s older sister, privateer Catherine Blackwood, to rescue him.

Catherine enlists the aid of some mercenaries.  In charge of them is Marcus Winchester, a veteran and law-enforcement officer on the planet New Austin, who needs the money.  Along with him is his teenage daughter Annie, who has gotten herself into a bit of trouble.  She beat the crap out of the daughter of one of the colony’s most powerful men.  The chick had it coming; she poisoned Annie’s horse the night before a competition.

Space travel is accomplished through wormholes, so Catherine and her crew will have to pass through multiple star systems to reach her brother.  Along the way they’ll encounter a variety of challenges.  Nothing is ever easy, it seems.  And when they finally reach her brother, that’s when things really get tough.

Her Brother’s Keeper was a lot of fun.  Kupuari juggles multiple viewpoint characters.  And while he doesn’t take a few swipes at some philosophies he doesn’t agree with, he never lets a message interfere with his story.  Things move quickly.  The background is well developed and never intrudes but adds to the story.  There’s a big enough universe here that I would like to spend more time exploring it.  (Remember that derelict ship I mentioned?)

This one is highly recommended.